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Overview
The sixties were the "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll" era, and Andy Warhol was its cultural icon. Painter, filmmaker, photographer, philosopher, Warhol was both celebrity and celebrant, the man who put the "Pop" in art. His studio, the Factory, where his free-spirited cast of "superstars" mingled with the rich and famous, was ground zero for the explosions that rocked American cultural life. And yet for all his fame, Warhol was an enigma: a participant in the excesses of his time who remained a faithful churchgoer, a nearly inarticulate man who was also a great aphorist ("In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes"), an artist whose body of work sizzles with sexuality but whose own body was a source of shame and self-hatred.In his bravura account of Warhol's life and work, scholar and culture critic Wayne Koestenbaum gets past the contradictions and reveals the man beneath the blond wig and dark glasses. Nimbly weaving brilliant and witty analysis into an absorbing narrative, Koestenbaum approaches Warhol as a serious artist, one whose importance goes beyond the sixties. Focusing on Warhol's provocative, powerful films (many of which have been out of circulation since their initial release), Koestenbaum shows that Warhol's oeuvre, in its variety of forms (films, silkscreens, books, "happenings"), maintains a striking consistency of theme: Warhol discovered in classic American images (Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, Marilyn's face) a secret history, an erotics of time and space.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
With at least two full-scale biographies in addition to his own voluminous writings in print, it might seem that there is little new to say about the life and career of mass market voyeur Warhol. Koestenbaum, a poet and author of fabulously rococo books on opera (The Queen's Throat) and Jackie Onassis (Jackie Under My Skin), seems acutely aware of this, and gives us a Warhol who is anything but the removed observer of most popular accounts, finding Warhol's own eros and mourning spilling everywhere into his art. The result is an intensely personalized psychologizing of the work; the more philosophically inclined will be horrified, while those looking for a way under "Andy's" implacable surfaces will be fascinated. The famous Brillo boxes become "boxes without openings [that] seem simulacra of Andy's body a queer body that may want to be entered or to enter, but that offers too many feints, too many surfaces, too much braggadocio, and no real opening." Koestenbaum is most trenchant in the sections devoted to Warhol's little-seen films, bringing their shattering experiments in sexual cinema vividly to life, freely and directly relating his own reactions to them la Pauline Kael at her best. Warhol's achievement in film, while clear to cognoscenti, certainly gets its best popular treatment here. Throughout, Koestenbaum's engagements with Warhol's life and art, tinged with poetic brilliance and surgical dispassion ("these accessories gave [Warhol] an alien aura, as if his vital fluids and gases had been evacuated"), feel very high-stakes indeed, making this book an engrossing battle of wills. (Sept.) Forecast: Koestenbaum, an engaging speaker and notoriously marvelous dresser, should attractfans to his five-city author tour. This book may be a little too queer for the average fan of the Warhol silk screens, but its audacious bodily insistence should win it plenty of reviews and admirers. Theory-heads should check out Andy Warhol, a collection of essays edited by New York University cinema studies professor Annette Michaelson, and including work by the likes of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. (MIT, $16.95 paper 132p ISBN 0-262-63242-X; Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
Warhol is indisputably one of the handful of towering figures of 20th-century art. Yet for all his success and the ubiquity of his images, he remains an icon filled with contradictions. This enigmatic artist has inspired a vast body of monographs, prompting one to wonder why another book is necessary. Koestenbaum (The Queen's Throat), one of our most insightful practitioners of contemporary cultural criticism, immediately puts that question to rest. His analysis of the Warhol phenomenon ranges from the artist's early-1950s line drawings, through his filmic output, to his work after his near-fatal shooting by a disgruntled acquaintance. Koestenbaum shines his flashlight on Warhol's sexuality and complicated body issues, arguing convincingly that they influenced practically everything the artist did and said. The text is constructed not only from a scholarly examination of the work but also from the obscure but fascinating aphorisms and insights of Warhol's personal acquaintances. As readable as any good novel, Koestenbaum's frank approach to Warhol is long overdue. Essential for all collections. Douglas McClemont, New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.Book Details
Published
January 1, 2002
Publisher
Thorndike Press
Pages
271
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780786238552